The New Yorker:

New building codes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development are the latest addition to a long list of Earth Week environmental wins for the White House.

By Bill McKibben

In recent days, the Biden Administration has been on a remarkable roll when it comes to the environment, with one key announcement after another helping to cement its reputation as the most climate-conscious in American history. In some cases, it defended previous decisions: the White House managed to get aid to Ukraine without giving in to Mike Johnson’s demand that it revoke its pause in new export permits for liquefied natural gas. Some tried to make up for bad decisions: the Interior Department protected a wide swath of the Alaskan Arctic from new oil drilling, not far from the site where it had bewilderingly approved the Willow project oil complex last year. Some were shiny and new, tied to Earth Day: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, the original sponsors of the Green New Deal, joined President Biden on Monday as he launched Solar for All, a seven-billion-dollar program to bring solar panels to low- and moderate-income Americans. Some summoned the romance of the past: the feds opened applications for the brand new Climate Corps, which is modelled on the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps but with young people signing up to bring clean energy to communities across the country. And some, as befits a fairly wonky Administration, were easy-to-miss technical changes that nonetheless may produce enormous change in the years ahead.

The best examples of that latter category came on Thursday, first with a new rule on cleaning up power plants which could save more than a billion tons of carbon by mid-century, and then with a little-noticed ruling by the Department of Housing and Urban Development which will require builders putting up federally funded houses and apartments to comply with a set of more recent building and energy codes instead of earlier, laxer standards. (The timing of the move owes less to Earth Day than to the fact that, under the Congressional Review Act, decisions announced before April 30th will be harder for a possible Trump Administration to overturn.) Though the new rule applies directly to only about a hundred and fifty thousand homes a year, the effect should ripple out across the building sector, and, in the process, help address not just rising temperatures but also the rising price of owning a home. And, of course, it comes despite a caterwauling campaign of protest from the industry affected, which has done all it could to cling to the past.

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